Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Naughty Sophie Hawthorne

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

DEAREST BELOVED The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family. By T. Walter Herbert. Illustrated. 331 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $28.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, seemed to have it all. They rapturously proclaimed their devotion to each other. They described their sexual relations as "blissful interviews." After "The Scarlet Letter" attained widespread attention on its publication in 1850, fame and financial security arrived.

But the real picture was hardly rosy, says T. Walter Herbert in his provocative new book, "Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family." Quite the contrary, he claims: the marriage was a glittering edifice on shaky foundations. According to Mr. Herbert, a professor of English at Southwestern University who is the author of "Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization," the problems within the marriage reflected larger problems with relations between the sexes in American culture as a whole.

Mr. Herbert scours the couple's private writings with the eye of an ace sleuth. Their professions of love, he argues, masked deep anxieties. They worshiped each other with the aim of dominating each other. Sophia was an aggressive tyrant masquerading as a domestic angel. Nathaniel wanted to govern his gentle "Dove" and, at the same time, to submit to his "naughty Sophie Hawthorne." In other words, they were interlocking figures of tyranny and submission.

Their three children shared their paradoxical nature, Mr. Herbert maintains. He scrutinizes the firstborn, Una, particularly closely, noting that although her name (derived from the "maiden of holiness" in Spenser's "Faerie Queene," a favorite of the Victorians) suggested purity and union, she could be perverse and anarchic. Her mother read into her rebellious behavior a feminist rage. Her father recoiled from her outbursts with puzzled timidity, yet looked to her for spiritual solace.

The ambiguities surrounding the parents and Una form the background to Mr. Herbert's reading of the family drama in "The Scarlet Letter." The obsessive, almost vampire-like relationship between the timid minister Arthur Dimmesdale and the worldly scientist Roger Chillingworth projects the conflict between the submissive and tyrannical sides of Hawthorne. Hester Prynne, like Sophia, is an unusual amalgam of rebelliousness and conventionality, while the daughter, Pearl, is patterned after the lawless but ethereal Una.

On the connection between Hawthorne's family life and his novels, Mr. Herbert is often suggestive. But on the link between Hawthorne's private neuroses and America's larger cultural conflicts, he skates on thin historical ice.

Mr. Herbert believes that Hawthorne had a lifelong sense of abandonment and buried anger as a result of the loss of his father, who died when Nathaniel was 4 years old. So deep was Hawthorne's grief, Mr. Herbert says, that in his last completed novel, "The Marble Faun," he expressed "anti-patriarchal rage." Here and elsewhere, Mr. Herbert risks exaggeration. Actually, there is no record of Hawthorne having directly mentioned his father, who died before he got to know him. That itself may be significant, but there's little evidence he forever lamented the loss.

Although Mr. Herbert writes lucidly and avoids the jargon that sometimes mars psychological criticism, he falls into the familiar trap of seeing sex in odd places. Hawthorne's seemingly straightforward description of the sluggish, dirty Concord River represents for Mr. Herbert "the torpor of Nathaniel's sexual exhaustion, his penis after orgasm symbolized by the flabby muddy slime of worms and eels." "Bundlebreech," a nickname Hawthorne gave his infant son Julian, suggests to Mr. Herbert "the bundle of male genitals" within the diapers. The fact that Hawthorne expressed playful pleasure at his son's sitting naked on Sophia's lap but recoiled when his daughter exposed her private parts while tumbling indicates, to Mr. Herbert, Hawthorne's sexual ambivalence.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Even if we grant that Hawthorne was tormented by family anxieties and sexual confusion, it is hard to swallow some of Mr. Herbert's cultural interpretations of these family problems.

Victorian America, he says, was oppressively prudish. A pervasive domestic ideal created a sharp distinction between the "male" sphere of capitalist activity and the "female" sphere of the home. In sexual matters, Mr. Herbert holds, men were expected to be restrained and utilitarian, women passionless and pure. Women could express affection to other women, but in the strongly homophobic atmosphere of antebellum America, men were forbidden this indulgence in same-sex affection. Trapped in the gilded cage of the middle-class marriage, sensitive men like Hawthorne were tormented by sexual feelings they could not, with propriety, fully express.

This rigid view of the roles assigned to men and women leads Mr. Herbert to make statements like: "The dichotomized gender system that portrayed women as passive recipients of male initiative structured the accompanying polarization of 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' desire in men."

Actually, in my research of the time and its popular culture I have found the climate to have been otherwise. The roles of the sexes proliferated, not narrowed, during this time. Women were not always expected to be passive angels. Working women, women's rights lecturers and the rising ideal of athletic womanhood get short shrift in Mr. Herbert's account. The variety and complexity of Hawthorne's heroines reflect these competing ideologies of womanhood.

Mr. Herbert also overstates the prudishness of the period. Indeed, the decade before the appearance of "The Scarlet Letter" saw a suddenly popular genre of somewhat pornographic fiction that featured, among other things, sensual women involved in illicit affairs with clergymen.

As for relations between men, homophobia did not reign supreme, despite what Mr. Herbert says. The very notion of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" was decades off. Like women, men were given a surprising latitude in their un-self-conscious expressions of love for one another. The roles of the sexes were not neatly schematized but were fluid, elastic, shifting. What Mr. Herbert sees as Hawthorne's androgynous or ambivalent sexuality, then, was not a gesture of rebellion against a monolithic model but was reflective of the age's complexities.

"Dearest Beloved" is best taken as an intriguing probe of a possibly darker side of the Hawthornes' marriage. Even on this score, however, some of its claims are suspect. A letter in which Sophia announces herself "the happiest of women" because of her "everlasting satisfaction" with her husband and children strikes Mr. Herbert as "a monument to repressed motherly and matrimonial fury." Would that all marriages were so miserable.

This book is part of a series called "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics." It may indeed qualify as the so-declared new historicism, but not as solid literary history. Like too many works of criticism today, it imposes current values on the past while playing fast and loose with the facts.

A version of this biography; review appears in print on February 7, 1993, on Page 7007025 of the National edition with the headline: Naughty Sophie Hawthorne. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe